Welcome! 🙂

The projects below were created by students at Amherst College as part of a final project for our STAT 231 Data Science course.

Scroll down to explore the students’ blog posts or use the navigation bar on the side to jump to a particular group!

Blog Posts 📝

eco friends

Health At Fast Food Restaurants Driving down any American city or town, there are fast food restaurants lining the streets. Faced with time constraints from work, childcare, and commuting, many people often turn to convenience foods to save time. Although these restaurants offer a solution to lost time in terms of food preparation and clean up, they simultaneously propose a new problem: a poor diet. According to a 2015 review, fast food is often high in sugar, salt, saturated or trans fats, and many processed preservatives, while also lacking beneficial nutrients. The goal of this blog is to answer the question: “Which fast food items from various restaurants best fit health-conscious dietary needs?” By categorizing all of the menu items at the most popular fast-food restaurants, we aim to provide readers with information that might influence their next order. Should you find yourself at Arbys, Burger King, Chick-Fil-A, Dairy Queen, McDonald’s, Sonic, Subway, or Taco Bell, we hope that you’ll be equipped with exactly what you need to know in order to stick to your health goals.

social justice

Performing Text Analysis on Amherst Student Opinion Articles Amherst students have a wide range of interests, hobbies, and experiences. With a student body of less than 2,000, Amherst prides itself on this diversity. How is this diversity reflected in student writing? And what does this tell us about the priorities and concerns of the student body? To answer these questions, we analyzed all 76 articles published this school year in the Opinion section of The Student, the main student-run magazine at Amherst College.

SunnyDay

Covid-19 Trends on the Global Level We chose to expand the area of our research to investigate global trends in covid cases in a few different ways. We wanted to look at the reactions — published documents or articles during 2020, as well as more case data. We looked at socioeconomic status and life expectancy as it related to case count, and finally clustered to attempt to determine what traits made countries good or bad at recovering from covid. As compared to our other project using only Massachusetts, we expanded our range and used more advanced statistical techniques.

shiny wizards

Beneath the Surface: A Finding Nemo Character Study Welcome to “Beneath the Surface”! If you’re a fan of the beloved Pixar classic, Finding Nemo, and are interested in analyzing the script using text analysis, you’re in the right place. In this blog, we’ll be taking a deep dive into the words spoken by each of the characters in the movie to uncover their personalities, motivations, and relationships with one another. Using text analysis tools, we’ll be able to examine the language and patterns of speech of each character and draw insights about how they contribute to the overall narrative. Whether you’re a fan of Marlin, Nemo, Crush, or any of the other lovable characters in this underwater adventure, “Beneath the Surface” is the place to be for a closer look at the story of Finding Nemo.

neuropeeps

Tracking COVID Cases in Relation to Country Freedom In this project, we examined the relationship between the stringency of a country’s COVID policy, i.e. the relative freedom allowed the people of the country during the COVID pandemic, and the per capita number of COVID cases that occurred in that country. We also observed how the levels of freedom and corresponding COVID case numbers changed over the three year course of the pandemic for which we have data, i.e. how responses shifted from the 2020 beginnings of the pandemic, to 2021, and up to 2022. To do so, we clustered countries by total number of deaths, total number of cases, and overall happiness score, and, based on these groupings at the start of the pandemic (2020 data) chose a country to examine. Additional countries were selected to ensure that nearly all continents (barring Antarctica, Australia, and North America) were included. For a country to be considered for further examination, they had to have data for all three years (no North American Country met this requirement, and thus was excluded) and had to have readily available text resources on their COVID policy. Otherwise, countries were chosen at random in an attempt to encompass a broader range of country experiences. We then performed text analysis on the COVID policies of these chosen countries to identify the most commonly used words in their COVID policies, to examine what regulations were present, and how this might have effected their per capita rate of COVID 19 infection within their country.

Sustainability

Sustainability We all have a role to play in creating a sustainable future for ourselves and for generations to come. One of the most pressing issues we face today is the high level of energy consumption and the resulting impact on the environment. In 2021, the United States alone consumed a staggering 3,930 terawatt hours of energy, with a significant portion of it coming from non-renewable sources like fossil fuels. This has a detrimental effect on the environment, contributing to climate change, air and water pollution, and other environmental issues. Melting glaciers are threatening to flood our valuable land and cities. An estimated 15 million people around the world are at risk of suffering sudden, deadly, and destructive flooding events due to the warming climate. By caring about sustainability and making conscious choices about energy use, we can help to reduce our carbon footprint and create a more sustainable future.

sports

An Analysis of Draft Picks In the NHL, NFL, NBA In this project, our group set out to take a more in-depth analysis of draft picks over the last 20 years of three of the four major sports leagues in North America. We aimed to see what what places produced the best picks and then what teams in the leagues are the ones making the best valued picks. We pulled our dataset for the NHL, NBA, and the NFL from Kaggle.

big data

Exploring Trends for Amherst College Emergency Medical Service This project uses data from the Amherst College Emergency Medical Service (ACEMS) to explore trends in campus medical emergencies. We wanted to pick a topic which could convey some information about Amherst, hoping that a more personal topic would lead to interesting findings. The decision to use ACEMS data began with a conversation between the two of us. With one of us a senior member of ACEMS and the other an unaffiliated Amherst student, we noticed a strong disconnect in the amount of campus knowledge and awareness of ACEMS (Julius didn’t even know how many members there were!). And given Austin’s connection to the team, accessing data and creating informed statistics would be much easier. We hope that this topic will both increase knowledge of ACEMS’ activities and generally reflect some trends of Amherst’s campus life.

TheBigThree

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ham and cheese

A Geographic Exploration of Mental Healthcare For this project, we chose to continue to explore mental health as we did in our Shiny app. However, while our Shiny app focused exclusively on students, we wanted to expand our target population to include all adults ages 18-39. Additionally, our previous project explored how demographic factors such as age, race, and education affected mental health diagnoses and outcomes; while we are still looking at diagnoses and outcomes here, we wanted to see how incorporating spatial data - specifically state-by-state breakdowns - might lead us to additional insights in these areas.

name oliva nick fritz

Olympics The Olympics are a worldwide celebration of the best athletes in the world that promotes peace and unity. There are no honors greater for athletes than winning a gold medal for their country. This incredible achievement may be influenced by obvious variables such as physical traits of the athletes, the type of olympics (summer or winter), or variables that one would not think are immediately related to sports. We suspect that factors such as a country’s total GDP and Population. We explore if these factors influence the number of medals won in the Olympics in this blog. Our aim is to deepen our understanding of what factors influence a country’s success in the games and spread the information in hopes that there may be a solution to even the playing field.

SJV Politics Economics

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Resources 📚

• Graphic at top of page and gif on left of page were created by Willa Jarnigan
• Images for each group were created by DALL-E
• Font is Poppins from Google fonts
• Emojis included via the emo R package